Disabling the whoopsie service in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server

You know sometimes I wonder if I am in the right job; having to disable the whoopsie service ??? Really!

Yes, really if we take a look at the whoopsise package :sudo dkpg -l whoopsie we can see that it is the crash reporting tool.

On Ubuntu server, though, I am not sure we need this, perhaps this is more for the desktop. It does not take that much resource, 20 MB or so but we can see using the output from top that is using the 2nd highest amount of ram, just my bash shell is taking more. When in top use the shift + F keys to sort on fields other than the CPU utilization.

Whoopsie is a service that is controlled via upstart. We can stop the service as with and other upstart service:

sudo initctl stop whoopsie

That, of course, just stops the service and it will start on a new system boot. To disable the service with upstart 1.3 and later we can use override files. Previously to upstart we would modify the config file directly for whoopsie, the /etc/init/whoopsie.conf just adding in manual will ensure the service will not automatically start; however, and updates to the system could overwrite your change. Hence, upstart now supports an override file. Simply add the line manual to /etc/init/whoopsie.override

sudo sh -c "echo 'manual' > /etc/init/whoopsie.override

So the service is now currently stooped as controlled by initctl and will not start as controlled by the override file